Active Inference without Internalism: Enactive Inference and Processual Perspectivism

Active Inference is often interpreted as a theory where the brain builds internal models of an external world, but this article argues it is better understood as enactive inference: a theory of embodied, affectively regulated coupling between organism and environment. Free-energy minimization cannot be reduced to passive sensory-surprise reduction, as shown by the dark-room problem, but must relate to expected free energy, exploration, viability, and biological normativity. Introducing processual perspectivism as an ontology of perspective-bearing life, the article posits that mind is not an inner representational object but the perspectival form of embodied self-organization, and consciousness is the intrinsic, affectively structured perspective of a living system regulating its openness to the world.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This article develops a processual-perspectivist interpretation of Active Inference. Predictive Processing, the Free Energy Principle, and Active Inference are often read as theories of internal world-modeling by an epistemically secluded brain. On such readings, the brain constructs generative models of hidden external causes and thereby risks reinstating a classical inside–outside architecture: here the model-building brain, there the external world to be inferred. Against this internalist interpretation, the article argues that Active Inference is philosophically most coherent when understood as enactive inference: a theory of embodied, affectively regulated organism–environment coupling. The dark-room problem serves as a diagnostic case showing why free-energy minimization cannot be reduced to passive sensory-surprise reduction, but must be understood in relation to expected free energy, exploration, viability, and biological normativity. Building on enactivism, autopoiesis, ecological psychology, interoceptive accounts of consciousness, affective embodiment, and debates on Markov blankets, the article introduces processual perspectivism as an ontology of perspective-bearing life. Mind is not an inner representational object, but the perspectival form of embodied self-organization. Consciousness is accordingly understood as the intrinsic, affectively structured perspective of a living system regulating its openness to the world. This framework preserves the formal strengths of Active Inference while resisting both reductive neurocentrism and traditional dualism.